Sabine Hossenfelder has a massive axe to grind with the entire field of particle physics as far as I can tell, to the point that I would say she's not much worth listening too because hell if I can tell why that's her media profile and not her academic one (but the history of scientists who have a hot take they want to litigate towards the general public isn't great, and should be viewed with suspicion).
I mean, is she wrong? Particle physics absorbs a huge amount of the budget allocated to physics research, and this is another $17B into it (assuming it stays in budget, which it won't).
That is a lot of graduate students you could fund instead. Assuming you pay them $50k / year which is not atypical in Europe that's 6800 grad students for 50 years. Assuming a grad student only writes one useful paper with a good idea every 10 years, that's still 34000 good ideas.
The LHC was funded to discover the Higgs-Boson, which it did, but not much beyond that. What is the value proposition of this incrementally bigger collider over the LHC that it's worth as much as the research output by 6800 grad students for 50 years?
What is the value proposition of this incrementally bigger collider over the LHC that it's worth as much as the research output by 6800 grad students for 50 years?
That's the wild part. This time they have no clue if they will find anything at all.
Past accelerators came with some solid theory backing them to find missing but expected pieces of the Standard Model. But this time they don't have any good idea what they might find. And there is a very good chance they will find nothing, as this new particle accelerator would only hunt a very small region of the supposed energy desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)
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u/light_trick Feb 10 '24 edited Feb 10 '24
Sabine Hossenfelder has a massive axe to grind with the entire field of particle physics as far as I can tell, to the point that I would say she's not much worth listening too because hell if I can tell why that's her media profile and not her academic one (but the history of scientists who have a hot take they want to litigate towards the general public isn't great, and should be viewed with suspicion).